PS4 taken apart! Lots of pics in link

See What’s Inside the PlayStation 4 With These Exclusive Photos
BY CADE METZ11.07.136:30 AM

A closeup of the green motherboard. The central processor is that big thing on the right, surrounded by eight memory chips. The other eight memory chips are on the other side of the board.
TOKYO — Inside Sony headquarters, at the heart of Tokyo’s Shinagawa district, Yasuhiro Ootori is about to reveal something that almost no one outside the Japanese tech giant has ever seen: the inside of a PlayStation 4.

It’s the middle of October, four weeks before the new game console is due to reach stores in the U.S. and Canada, and Ootori — director of the mechanical engineering team in charge of the PS4 — is surrounded by a phalanx of other Sony engineers, several PR handlers, two journalists, and six guys set to capture the moment on video. Not to mention the interpreter who will instantly translate his commentary into English.

The video producer slaps his hands in front of the two cameras — an imitation of an old movie clapboard — and the Sony man spends the next hour and half taking the console apart, piece by sacred piece. He even wears white gloves. It’s the world’s first PlayStation 4 teardown.

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What we see is a hardware architecture that’s both simple and powerful. With longtime game designer Mark Cerny leading the way, lending his software-minded expertise to Ootori and the rest of the hardware engineering team, Sony abandoned the overly complex Cell microprocessor that drove the PlayStation 3, building the PS4 around an “x86″ chip similar to the processors that have driven most of our personal computers for the last three decades. The idea was to make it that much easier for developers to build games for the new console, to create the things that will ultimately capture our attention.

“We ended up with a platform that was more appropriately targeted at the game — which is kind of the point — and less about designing a hardware platform in a vacuum,” says Chris Zimmerman, the co-founder and director of development at Sucker Punch Productions, a game designer owned by Sony that is currently building a title InFAMOUS: Second Son for the new console.

“Things have gotten a little more standard, in layman’s terms. The Sony hardware, historically, has been very quirky. If you were willing to put the effort in to take advantage of those quirks, you could do some incredible things, but there was a lot of effort involved to just get to the point of getting everything running. That’s less the case with this [console] generation.”

That said, the PS4 still goes beyond the average PC, combining a CPU, the central brain of any computer, with a GPU, which is typically used to render graphics. The result is a processor that can juggle those two roles with unusual efficiency, as it taps into 8GB of GDDR5 memory — 16 times what you got with the PS3. What this ultimately gives you, Cerny explains, are “richer” game worlds. In other words, if you enter a virtual city during a PS4 game, “everyone looks different — finally.”

Zimmermann says much the same thing. “There is more fine detail on everything on the screen, but for us, the real changes are more qualitative,” he explains, explaining that the console has allowed games to offer, among other things, a more realistic lighting model. “Things we couldn’t do before — like wet streets — we can now do an exceptional job on.”

It should be noted that many high-end PC gaming rigs provide much the same horsepower as the PS4, but the console certainly exceeds what you get in the new world of mobile games, and it offers one thing you don’t get from a PC: the enormous game machine that is Sony, which owns a wide array of well-known game design houses, including Sucker Punch. It’s these design houses that will ultimately show the worth of the PS4. “It’s not the box that counts as much as the games,” says Harold Goldberg, a game pundit and author of the book All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How 50 Years of Videogames Conquered Pop Culture.

In the photos above, you’ll also notice the power adapter tucked inside the console — which means the PS4 won’t clutter your living room with an external power brick — and you’ll find all the other hardware essential to any modern console, from Wi-Fi and Bluetooth antennas to an optical drive that reads DVDs and Blu-ray discs. It’s a tight fit for all this hardware inside the rather slim PS4, but the console was carefully designed to efficiently move heat out of the enclosure, using two heat pipes and a specially designed centrifugal fan.

What the console doesn’t give you is hardware that can play PS3 games. But you can’t have everything.

Is it me, or does that APU seem kinda small (physically) for what is housed inside of it?! I would of thought that thing would of been massive! Either way, I think the PS4's motherboard is a much cleaner design compared to the XB1, but both are still very pretty on the inside!

Originally Posted by Lefein

Looks like the RAM is being printed in 1GB modules currently. So, Sony did pony up for the 8GBs after all. (Or was it being printed in 512MB chips before the announcement in Feb)?

If you watch the video, on the back side of the motherboard there are more chips, so it probably still is 512MB modules.

Cant believe I didnt notice this before, not the biggest deal but the kind of thing that makes me appreciate the PS4's design that much more. The way she's designed is genius!
Not just because it looks bad ass, not because its the most powerful console on the planet,
but the shape of the console has an extremely practical purpose.
Because of its shape it's not possible to accidentally block the vents by putting it to close to something.
The groove running all around the sides has vents on the right and left side, so even if things are pushed directly up against the PS4, the grooves allow the air to travel down them and get sucked into the PS4, then that air gets blown out the main vent in the back.

That's not all! The angle in the rear provides room for the power cord to hang naturally.
So even if you push the PS4 all the way back, touching the wall, the point of the slant would touch the wall leaving the bottom to have space allowing the power cord to not smash itself into the wall.

There was some serious thought put into this design.
I can't wait to finally have mine.
Sooo close you guys!

Sweet jesus......Its so clean and optimised. Those GDDR5 chips must be costing a fair amount of the total price as there is just not much else on the board. Such a stark contrast to the PS3/360 and X1, though there is a decent chance the internals of the X1 might have changed

The XB1 just has a $#@! ton of resistors all over the motherboard too!

Both of those boards are very sparsely populated compared to what I'm used to dealing with. You could do it in < 1/2 the board area.

Sony did a very nice job of maximizing the use of space, or more importantly minimizing unnecessary space. If you look at it, the top down surface area is about the minimum needed in order to fit in the BD Drive, HDD, Heat Sink, Fan, and Power Supply. Vertically speaking, it's very optimal. Motherboard (upside down oriented) to bottom end of Heat Sink consumes about all of the vertical depth available.

Back to the motherboard. I'd say they simply had all the area, so they used it to the max. They can actually save money by having a larger PCB but w/ fewer routing layers. Have a layout that isn't extremely tight would allow for fewer routing layers.

The PS4's layout and box design is a very nice design.

MS's design on the other hand IMHO looked like it wasn't near as well thought out in terms of space utilization. They have a $#@! ton of space in the box, and they still didn't bother to integrate in a power supply.

I will admit I like the look of the XB1, and I don't care that it is larger, but they should have integrated the power supply inside when they have so much wasted space. IMHO it was a poorly designed box from a space utilization perspective.

MS's design on the other hand IMHO looked like it wasn't near as well thought out in terms of space utilization. They have a $#@! ton of space in the box, and they still didn't bother to integrate in a power supply.

That is what still floors me, with all that open space in that box they could of easily added in a built in power supply! I understand they wanted to make sure that thing stayed cool this time around, but damn, come on already!

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